Grown Up to Soon

One of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around in India is the desire of families to marry off their daughters at very young ages.  Some do it out of necessity, because they can't afford to take care everyone.  Some do it because that's just "what you do." Their parents did it and their parents did it.  And so on.  The girls go live with the husband's family and start having babies as soon as possible.  The circle of life, if you will.  (FYI, the legal age to marry is 18.)


The little girl to my right is 14 years old.  She looks more like she's 10.  She wanted me to pray for her to have a baby.  I mean SHE is just a baby.  She said she has been married several months and still hasn't conceived.  A lot of people ask me to pray for them to have babies, but she is the youngest one so far.

I can't even imagine this.  She should be in school.  She should be outside playing.  I am not judging.  This is a cultural thing that you see mostly in the lower castes.  I know life is hard for them.  I've seen where they live and how large their families are. They struggle to exist on meager wages; a lot on less than $1 a day.  

I'm praying for her.  I'm praying that she will have a wonderful marriage and that she is blessed with many children.  That's all she has.  Will you pray for her, too?

The Soul of India

I should have several more blog posts coming soon. Lots of new subject matter. We just got back from 6 days out in the villages of India.  I'm not going to lie.  I didn't think I could do 6 days, but I did and enjoyed every minute of it.  Well, maybe not EVERY minute, but you get the idea.  


First, I should define what exactly a village is.  Hyderabad is a city.  Estimates vary (like everything else in India), but it has around 8 million people. In contrast, villages are smaller than cities.  The size of these villages vary considerably, but some "villages" have a million people in them. 

Ghandi once said, "The soul of India lives in its villages."  Most of India's 1.2 billion population live in villages.  Each village has its leaders.  Just like anywhere, these leaders can be good or bad.  But, "bad" in India is usually really bad. Think mafia. Fortunately, we have only encountered good ones.  If the leader of a village likes you, then you pretty much have free reign. Out of respect, we try to meet at least one of the leaders when we go to a new village. They appreciate it and are always very gracious. In fact, we have been given unbelievable access to a lot of these villages. 

We had several men from the US come over and go out with us.  It was an awesome time!  I experienced several "firsts" on this trip that I want to tell you about. More to come….

Singapore

We spent a long weekend in Singapore in November.  Had a great time!  It's clean with lots of shopping, good food and photo opportunities everywhere I turned!  We even found a church to go to on Sunday morning!  What more could we ask for?  

View of the Singapore financial district from our hotel room.  

I blew the next two photos, but I thought I would post them anyway.  Below is a picture of the rooftop pool at our hotel.  Beautiful view, but a little too cold for this southern girl to get in!   

Another view of the rooftop pool for all of my friends who are afraid of heights.  Just a little intimidating! 

We must have a sign on our backs that says, "We are suckers and don't ask the price up front." We took a bicycle rickshaw a distance of about 1.5 miles.  Most expensive taxi we've ever taken! Notice us smiling in this picture.  It was taken right before he told us how much we owed.  Oh well, you only live once.  Cross this off the bucket list. 

Everyone told us we had to try the chili crab while we were in Singapore.  Kind of like how you must have BBQ when you go to Memphis or cream pie when you go to Boston. (HA! Just kidding. Checking to see if you're still reading or not.)  Chili crab is on the left and black pepper crab is on the right.  That is a single crab on each plate!  The chili crab was wonderful, but both of us liked the black pepper crab better. 

I knew it was going to be good when they gave me an apron! They gave us utensils to eat the crab with but using our hands was much more productive! It was messy, but oh so delicious!

One of the landmark hotels in Singapore.  The Fullerton Hotel sits on the river within walking distance to a lot of restaurants and attractions.  We didn't stay here.  I just thought it was pretty all lit up at night.

Singapore is home to largest ferris wheel in the world.  The Singapore Flyer is 42 stories tall (541').  It takes 30 minutes for it to make one full rotation. I thought about going up…..for about 5 seconds. Then, my fear of heights won out.

While we were there, I practiced taking long exposure photos.  This is the Clarke Quay area of Singapore.  Lots of restaurants and things to do here.  The lights in the center of the river is a bumboat.  

Singapore skyline in the background.  Notice the big smiles.  This was after a great steak dinner at Morton's!

I took this photo of the Singapore financial district skyline and had it mounted on canvas and framed to give to Weston for Christmas.

We had a great visit to Singapore.  There are so many things to do.  There was no way to do it all in our short time there.  I guess another trip is in order! 

Pashupatinath Temple - Nepal

Warning: content could be considered disturbing for some people!!

Initially, I decided that I wasn't going to post about Pashupatinath because I thought some people would be disturbed by it.  However, I am going to post about it because it is one of the most significant Hindu temples in the world.  It is regarded as the most sacred temple of Lord Shiva.

According to Wikipedia:

Pashupatinath Temple's existence dates back to 400 A.D. The richly-ornamented pagoda houses the sacred linga or holy symbol of Lord Shiva. 

Legend says that Lord Shiva once took the form of an antelope and sported unknown in the forest on Bagmati river's east bank. The gods later caught up with him, and grabbing him by the horn, forced him to resume his divine form. The broken horn was worshipped as a linga but overtime it was buried and lost. Centuries later an astonished herdsmen found one of his cows showering the earth with milk. Digging deep at the site, he discovered the divine linga of Pashupatinath. 

Only Hindus are allowed inside the temple, so we had to view it from the outside.

Entrance to the temple. We only get as close as the red carpet.

View from outside looking into the temple at the large golden bull.

Lingas

Sadhus (holy men). Their business is having photos taken of them.

The actual temple isn't what I thought would be disturbing to people.  It is what else that happens at Pashupatinath.  Located on the banks of the holy Bagmati River, Hindu cremation ceremonies occur here 24/7.

The cremations are performed on the banks of the river on platforms that are prepared in advance.

Whole families come to watch and mourn.

People watching a body being prepared for cremation. The body will be draped with flowers and  carried down to the riverbank.  There family members will pay their last respects and sprinkle the body with holy water from the Bagmati River.

The men of the family prepare the body for cremation.

The sons perform the cremation. The oldest son leads the others and they circle the body clockwise three times.

Then he lights the fire.

They cover the body with wood and straw.

The men tend to the body making sure the fire stays lit and it is burning properly.

Spectators include both foreigners and Hindus.

 Notice the boys swimming in the river across from where the cremation is taking place.

Pashupatinath is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  If you are going to Kathmandu, it is worth seeing if only for the architecture.  However, it's not a place where I would want to visit again.  We felt an uncomfortable eeriness the whole time we were there.  It's one of those places that we can check off our list, but not go back to again.

Kathmandu, Part II - Temples

With Christmas fast approaching, I thought I should catch up a little on the blog.  Since my last post on August 8th, our oldest son has gotten married.  We have hosted quite a few visitors here in India, been out to the villages a few times, taken a quick trip to Singapore and hosted Thanksgiving dinner at our house for the expats that Mike works with. So a lot has been going on!

To finish up with my Kathmandu posts, here is Part II.

We visited many temples while we were in Kathmandu.  Some were Buddhist, but most were Hindu (80%) with a few Muslims (11%).  So, there are a lot of Hindu temples in Kathmandu.
Below are some pictures of the ones we saw.

Hindu Temple

Hindu Temple

Outside a Hindu temple

Hindu temple in Kathmandu

Hindu temple in the base of a tree

Someone dressed up as Lord Hanuman, also called the monkey god.  Hanuman is one of the most popular Hundu gods and he is worshiped as a symbol of strength and devotion.

The temples that I found the most interesting were the Buddhist ones. Nepal is the birthplace of Buddha, so there are many temples in Kathmandu.  There are two major Buddhist temples here: Boudhanath and Swayambhunath.

Boudhanath sits in the middle of Kathmandu.  Thousands of pilgrims gather daily to make the clockwise circumnavigation of the temple under the watchful eyes of Buddha while they pray or chant.  Their belief is that with each completion of the circuit, certain prayers are lifted up.

People walking clockwise around Boudhanath.

Prayer wheels, below, are also spun clockwise.  With each spin, the prayers that are printed on the wheels are lifted up as if a person is actually saying the prayers.  We saw the same people go by the wheels many times.

Prayer wheels at Swayambhunath

 

 

Large prayer wheel inside the monastery at Boudhanath.

Buddhist monks-in-training

Buddhist monk

Swayambhunath temple, also known as the monkey temple because of the monkeys that live around it.

Kathmandu, Part 1 (Mountains and Monkeys)

I know I said the Taj Mahal was next, but I changed my mind.  Our trip to Nepal was too short.  We are definitely going to have to make another trip.  We had planned on taking a trip up to Everest, but the weather was rainy and cloudy.  We did take a plane trip to see it.  We saw it peaking over the cloud cover, which was totally cool.  The picture below is as close as we could get.  Hopefully we can get back in the fall when the weather is better.

Mt. Everest (29,000ft) on the left.  Lhotse (27.900ft) is on the right. 

Some friends told us about a quaint little hotel in Kathmandu, Hotel Courtyard, in the Thamel area.  Thamel is the tourist area of Kathmandu.  While some people may want to shy away from it, we enjoyed being in the middle of restaurants, etc.  An added bonus is that there is a camera shop on every corner, which came in handy when a monkey stole my lens cap!  The owners of the hotel, Michelle and Pujan, like to keep it small and friendly.  They were wonderful hosts!  The first night we were there, they arranged an authentic Nepalese dinner at a local restaurant for all their guests.  Who would've thought a year ago that we would be having dinner in Kathmandu with people from all over the world?

Hotel Courtyard, Kathmandu, Nepal

Kathmandu Valley

There were monkeys everywhere.  I love monkeys, so I thought it was so cool to see them just running wild all around us.  They weren't the least bit bothered by the fact that we were there.

Swimming pool for monkeys

More Nepal coming....

Delhi

Weston and Taylor at the
India Gate, Delhi.

I am back in Tennessee getting ready for Matt’s wedding.  When I went to church, I was gently reminded that I haven’t put a new blog post up in over a month! Yikes, time flies!

We've had a busy time since my last blog post.  Mike's job continues to keep him busy and challenged!  It's very different doing business in India compared to the US.  He's learning the ins and outs of it and what to do and not do.  

Weston and his girlfriend, Taylor, came to visit for 3 weeks in July.  Three weeks sounds like a long time, but it really isn’t.  There was so much I wanted them to see and not enough time to do it.  So, we decided to take them to Delhi/Agra and then to Kathmandu, Nepal. 

Besides the compulsory mall trip, in Delhi we visited the Red Fort, Qutab Minar, India Gate and the Lotus Temple.  We crammed as much into 2 days as we possibly could.  

Lotus Temple, Delhi

The Lotus Temple, the Mother Temple of India, is a Bahai house of worship.  It is open to people of all religions.  We didn't get to go inside because we were there on a Friday, which is the primary day of worship.  There were thousands of people waiting in line to get in.

Qutab Minar

Qutab Minar (Delhi) is the tallest minar in India.  Contruction began on it around 1200 A.D.  It was constructed as an Islamic monument, however there are many Hindu influences in the carvings on the walls of the buildings that surround the minar.  It used to be open for people to climb the 379 stairs to the top of the 238’ high tower.  However, in 1981, there was an accident when the electricity went out resulting in total darkness in the stairway.  Forty-five people (mostly children) were killed in the stampede. 

Carving on the walls at Qutab Minar

Close up of the carvings on the walls and pillars at
Qutab Minar

That was our quick tour of Delhi.  Next stop....Kathmandu!